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Show HN: Unregistry – “docker push” directly to servers without a registry

(github.com)
726 points psviderski | 2 comments | 18 Jun 25 23:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.573s | source

I got tired of the push-to-registry/pull-from-registry dance every time I needed to deploy a Docker image.

In certain cases, using a full-fledged external (or even local) registry is annoying overhead. And if you think about it, there's already a form of registry present on any of your Docker-enabled hosts — the Docker's own image storage.

So I built Unregistry [1] that exposes Docker's (containerd) image storage through a standard registry API. It adds a `docker pussh` command that pushes images directly to remote Docker daemons over SSH. It transfers only the missing layers, making it fast and efficient.

  docker pussh myapp:latest user@server
Under the hood, it starts a temporary unregistry container on the remote host, pushes to it through an SSH tunnel, and cleans up when done.

I've built it as a byproduct while working on Uncloud [2], a tool for deploying containers across a network of Docker hosts, and figured it'd be useful as a standalone project.

Would love to hear your thoughts and use cases!

[1]: https://github.com/psviderski/unregistry

[2]: https://github.com/psviderski/uncloud

1. fellatio ◴[19 Jun 25 02:41 UTC] No.44314970[source]▶
Neat idea. This probably has the disadvantage of coupling deployment to a service. For example how do you scale up or red/green (you'd need the thing that does this to be aware of the push).

Edit: that thing exists it is uncloud. Just found out!

That said it's a tradeoff. If you are small, have one Hetzner VM and are happy with simplicity (and don't mind building images locally) it is great.

replies(1): >>44315361 #
2. psviderski ◴[19 Jun 25 04:12 UTC] No.44315361[source]▶
For sure, it's always a tradeoff and it's great to have options so you can choose the best tool for every job.